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Paleozoic
The Paleozoic or Palaeozoic Era (from the Greek palaios (παλαιός), "old" and zoe (ζωή), "life", meaning "ancient life") is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic eon. The Paleozoic spanned from roughly 542 to 251 million years ago (ICS, 2004), and is subdivided into six geologic periods; from oldest to youngest they are: the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian. Fish populations exploded in the Devonian. During the late Paleozoic, great forests of primitive plants thrived on land forming the great coal beds of Europe and eastern North America. By the end of the era, the first large, sophisticated reptiles and the first modern plants (conifers) had developed. The Paleozoic era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event. The effects of this catastrophe were so devastating that it took life on land 30M years to recover. During the hiatus between the late Precambrian and the Paleozoic era most of the evidence of the earth's early history was destroyed by erosion. From the beginning of the Paleozoic, shallow seas began to encroach on the continents. In North America, the era began with submerged geosynclines, or downward thrusts of the earth's crust, along the eastern, southeastern, and western sides of the continent, while the interior was dry land. As the era proceeded, the marginal seas periodically washed over the stable interior, leaving sedimentary deposits to mark their incursions. During the early part of the era, the area of exposed Precambrian, or shield, rocks in central Canada were eroding, supplying sediment to the geosynclines from the interior. Beginning in the Ordovician period, mountain building intermittently proceeded in the eastern part of the Appalachian geosyncline throughout the rest of the era, bringing in new sediments. Sediments washing from the Acadian Mts. filled the western part of the Appalachian geosyncline to form the famous coal swamps of the Carboniferous period. Uplift of the Appalachians caused the region to be never again inundated by vast marginal seas. Paleoclimatic studies and evidence of glaciers indicate that central Africa was most likely in the polar regions during the early Paleozoic. During the early Paleozoic, the huge continent Gondwanaland had either formed or was forming. By mid-Paleozoic, the collision of N America and Europe produced the Acadian-Caledonian uplifts, and a subduction plate uplifted eastern Australia. By late Paleozoic, continental collisions formed the supercontinent Pangaea and resulted in some of the great mountain chains, including the Appalachians, Urals, and Tasmans. The most noteworthy feature of Paleozoic life is the sudden appearance of nearly all of the invertebrate animal phyla in great abundance at the beginning of the Cambrian. A few primitive fishlike invertebrates, and then vertebrates, appeared in the Cambrian and Ordovician, scorpions in the Silurian period, land invertebrates and amphibians in the Devonian, land reptiles in the Carboniferous, and marine reptiles in the Permian. All reptiles increased in number and in variety by the late Permian. The plant life of the Paleozoic era reached its climax in the Carboniferous and was much contracted in the Permian.